One of the most important factors in building up a trusting relationship with a very distressed person, (or a group of people, i.e. a family), is consistency.
Many people begin their careers at community level working closely with distressed families, children and young people. Very often, after some years, perhaps just as families are beginning to get to know them and (hopefully) trust them, they move on.
As I stated in a previous post, I’ve seen a lot of practitioners going to jobs in statutory agencies or, perhaps, academia, gaining fantastic experience in the community and voluntary sector and undoubtedly doing their job really well but seen as transient by the people that matter most.
I propose that there are a number of reasons why this happens.
While I acknowledge burn-out and secondary trauma are contributory factors, there is also the lack of proper career structure in the community and voluntary sector.
(That having been said, maybe things like career structures would destroy the freshness and vitality of the sector – though I think that career structure and freshness and vitality could both be accommodated)!
I also know a few people (including myself) who got fed up of working in the Pillars and chose to change to the community sector. I was always determined to develop myself in the context of the community rather than any other environment. Part of the reason for this is that the learning (virtually all experiential) that I experience day-to-day is richer and more meaningful.
And yes, I know it’s easy for me to say that, because I had stayed in school, been to college and worked in the Pillars!
One of the first things that I noticed about this area of work was that the people on the ground are the people who want the problem solved; many practitioners are passing through. I think that this observation was very influential in my decision to stay in community work.
(I’d be interested to hear from you if you have been doing this and similar work over a long time – e.g. 15+ years – as to what were the motivating factors in your choosing to remain).
The next post and the one after it list some factors which are important in respect of staff security which I think we need in our organisation if we are committed to supporting families in the Focus Group. They are not, of course, exhaustive – but they will hopefully spark some thoughts on general conditions of work in the sector.
Security encourages us, as we start out in the work, to consider it as a genuine career option, not as a stepping stone to better, well paid, more secure jobs in more mainstream agencies whether statutory or voluntary.
And, importantly, I also think that a feeling of security enhances our tenacity.